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Hardware Samsung Announces 64GB Flash-SSD
Brandon Hill (Blog) - March 27, 2007 10:38 AM
Print 22 comment(s) - last by johnnyMon.. on Mar 27 at 9:02 PM
Samsung doubles the capacity of its SSD

The battle in the solid state disk (SSD) arena continues to get fiercer as Samsung has announced a new 1.8" 64GB SSD to accompany the existing 32GB unit. The new drive offers read and write performance that has been increased 20 percent and 60 percent respectively over the latter offering.

Samsung's new 64GB SSD takes advantage of SLC flash and offers read speeds of 65MB/s and write speeds of 45MB/sec. The older 32GB SSD drive introduced last year puts up numbers of 53MB/sec and 30MB/sec respectively.

For comparison, SanDisk lists the read speeds of its newly announced 2.5" 32GB SSD drive at 67MB/sec -- write speeds were not given. Adtron’s latest SSDs trump both offerings, however, with read speeds of 65-70MB/sec and write speeds of 65-55MB/sec.

Samsung expects that the market for SSDs will jump dramatically over the next four years. The company is forecasting that shipments will jump from 2.2 million units in 2006 to 9 million in 2010. Likewise, sales are expected to rise from $56 million USD in 2006 to over $6.8 billion USD in 2010.

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What about the issue of flash memory wearing out?
By johnnyMon on 3/27/2007 2:43:39 PM , Rating: 2
Don't they degrade over time? Have they solved this? Hard drives see such regular access, especially in the FAT and programs and files that are used frequently. Will flash-based drives not last as long as current hard drives? Thanks for cluing me in on this aspect. :)




By CascadingDarkness on 3/27/2007 3:19:14 PM , Rating: 3
Yes http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4962

My question would be specific to my company. Our remote laptops have a utility that zeros out the page file several times before shutting down (to make hacking more difficult if they were stolen).

Depending how many bit writes this does sure it decrease life of drive. Will it be anything significant considering they say 150 years, I doubt it.


By Oregonian2 on 3/27/2007 3:19:23 PM , Rating: 2
Flash drivers have the FAT (as you mentioned) move around the flash array to spread where the writes occur physically even to the same logical location -- where on a hard disk they'd be writing the same physical place over and over.


By Dactyl on 3/27/2007 5:00:27 PM , Rating: 2
Do they degrade over time? YES.

Have they solved this? YES, they've solved it well enough.

What matters is not just whether they degrade, but how much they degrade. With 100,000 writes possible on some NAND flash, and flash controllers that keep track of how many times an area has been accessed to spread the access evenly. Further, there can be error correction when an area does fail (and the controller remembers which areas have failed!). So flash can be extremely reliable for a very long time, better than a HDD, and plenty good enough for our use.


By johnnyMon on 3/27/2007 9:02:27 PM , Rating: 2
Great - thanks everyone.

It bugs me a little that I would know my drive is slowly wearing out, portions becoming unusable, but that may be already happening with my current drives anyway.

If I knew that they'd be as reliable as a platter drive, that 10 years after I stopped using it I could pull it from storage and the data would be there, I'd be happy to use them. Hard drive storage is the best long-term backup solution I've found in my (non-professional) computer use.


Where are the SATA 3.5" versions
By PAPutzback on 3/27/2007 11:00:21 AM , Rating: 2
So we have low power drives and CPUs now. If only the GPU companys would think small and cool we could be running high performance SFF PCs. I'd use Intel matrix raid on couple of these with 1 raid 1 volume and 1 raid 0.




RE: Where are the SATA 3.5" versions
By FITCamaro on 3/27/2007 11:26:52 AM , Rating: 2
GPUs capable of truly complex graphics will never be small or cool. Modern GPUs have 3-4x the transistors of processors (if you don't count the cache which is half or more of the transistors of a CPU today). That means larger dies, more heat, and more power. Integrated chipsets can be made relatively small, cool, and power efficient but they won't be capable of truly complex graphics.


RE: Where are the SATA 3.5" versions
By Madzombie on 3/27/2007 12:47:29 PM , Rating: 2
I still think there's a market for low-power, mid end GPUs. Power consumption increases with voltage squared, and voltage requirements increase with clock speed. That means that a doubling in clock speed often multiplies power requirements by over 4x. My idea is to have a large die GPU with perhaps 16 pipelines that operates at a relatively slow clock speed of 200-250Mhz, along with a correspondingly low voltage. That would give similar fill rate to the 400-500Mhz 8 pipeline cards that are common in mid-end mobile GPUs but with reduced power consumption.


RE: Where are the SATA 3.5" versions
By KernD on 3/27/2007 7:05:43 PM , Rating: 2
The reason they don't do this is there profit margin, 16 pipes would cost more to make then 8 and would give the same performance, clocking it higher is easy and doesn't cost much more, just a little better cooling.


RAID and SSD
By IcY18 on 3/27/2007 10:53:12 AM , Rating: 4
i wonder when that first enthusiast/hardware site is going to put a pair of these SSD's in a RAID 0 array. It would be interesting to see how they perform.




RE: RAID and SSD
By kattanna on 3/27/2007 11:54:13 AM , Rating: 3
aye..im restlessly awaiting that.

2 in RAID 0..

how about 4..that should trully for once introduce the bus as the bottleneck.

but when 32GB or even 64GB drives are around $150~ish a piece..4 in RAID 0 should be simply amazing.

but yeah, im hoping that 2 in RAID 0 becomes affordable very soon.


Adtron surprisingly faster...
By daftrok on 3/27/2007 12:00:11 PM , Rating: 2
I find it amazing that Adtron not only created a HDD that's bigger in size, but also in speed. I wonder why Adtron is so much further than Samsung? Any ideas?




RE: Adtron surprisingly faster...
By TomZ on 3/27/2007 12:18:52 PM , Rating: 3
I wouldn't get performance impressions from company PR releases, brochures, and web sites. Only a good benchmark will tell you what the "real" performance is for these drives.


SATA or IDE or other
By peternelson on 3/27/2007 12:08:00 PM , Rating: 3
When reporting devices like this, please say whether it is a SATA or IDE version being offered.




RE: SATA or IDE or other
By peternelson on 3/27/2007 12:10:13 PM , Rating: 2
From zooming the photo this one looks ATA7 ie IDE/PATA rather than SATA. Stating that would save me looking and enable rapid comparison with similar SSD storage.


Buy it?
By mydogfarted on 3/27/2007 6:09:50 PM , Rating: 2
Great, everyone is announcing them but where can you buy one?




RE: Buy it?
By FrankM on 3/27/2007 7:19:32 PM , Rating: 3
I was about to write the same.
Nice that they are announcing all these, but when will they be available? I find it ridiculous that they have been announcing and demonstrating solid state drives for almost a year now (or even more), but they are still not available (except in a few subnotebooks). I'm getting a bit tired of this.


Screwed up numbers
By peldor on 3/27/2007 11:34:47 AM , Rating: 2
Samsung expects that the market for SSDs will jump dramatically over the next four years. The company is forecasting that shipments will jump from 2.2 million units in 2006 to 9 billion in 2010. Likewise, sales are expected to rise from $56 million USD in 2006 to over $6.8 billion USD in 2010.

There's no way these numbers are talking about SSD as hard drive replacements. First, there isn't a market for 9 billion harddrives (300-400 million maybe). Second, they're projecting the 9 billion drives to cost less than $1 each! Somebody's moved a decimal point.




RE: Screwed up numbers
By cochy on 3/27/2007 12:43:05 PM , Rating: 2
Someone should switch the "b" in 9 billion with an "m".


woot
By Ralph The Magician on 3/27/2007 12:39:21 PM , Rating: 2
Maybe now a widescreen video iPod would actually be feasible.




RE: woot
By IcY18 on 3/27/2007 2:08:28 PM , Rating: 2
Not with SSD's costing more than the Ipod as a whole. In the near future yes, but within the next 3 years i doubt it.


1.8" mechanical drives
By Lonyo on 3/27/2007 11:00:09 AM , Rating: 2
I tested my old 1.8" 40GB Toshiba (hooked up via an external USB enclosure) and it managed about 12MB/s.

For these SSD 1.8" drives to have read/write speeds not that far off desktop 7200rpm drives is very nice. Even though the Adtron 2.5" may have slightly higher speeds, compared to their mechanical equivelants, the 1.8" drives are much faster, while 2.5" drives are only slightly faster.




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